Buyer personas are semi-detailed insights into your ideal customers. They give details such as your buyers’ demographics, purchase goals and buying preferences. Buyer personas play a significant role in a business’ product development and marketing decisions.
Businesses that develop and apply buyer personas witness a 2X to 5X higher conversion rate than companies that do not. Such companies also enjoy a 14% higher customer retention rate and a revenue rate that is 19% higher.
While research and technology are key tools for building well-developed buyer personas, they alone are not enough. Personas are your primary touchpoints for your buyers. Your opportunity to influence your buyer experiences also begins with your personas.
So, what is the key factor that should underpin your buyer personas?
Humanizing each persona with care.
Call them Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs), accounts, leads, or prospects, buyers at any stage of purchase are fundamentally people. They are human beings with their own stories, journeys, and preferences. And the most authentic way to connect with people is through emotions – the human element so often missing in B2B marketing.
What happens with this shift to humanize each buyer persona?
Your ICPs would now need to include factors that reflect the human needs of your buyers. In addition to the standard technographic and firmographic data, you would be including buyers’ psychographics, emphasizing attributes such as their:
Building ICPs with the human aspect in mind helps you build outreach strategies that connect more deeply with buyers.
For example, suppose your demographic insights convey that most of your buyers are Millennials and Gen Zs. Including psychographic data would indicate that these buyers prefer self-service, rely on their trustworthy network for decision-making, and evaluate vendors’ environmental responsibility while shortlisting suppliers (Forrester). Now you can take action accordingly.
These invaluable insights enable you to deliver personalization at scale. With buying committees becoming bigger, involving 7 members, at the least, and extending to even 20 members, the need for deep personalization will only become more urgent.
When you start looking at buyers, buying committees, and buyer companies from a human angle, you begin to understand their point of view with empathy, and you learn better what makes them tick. This difference in perspective enables you to strategize your sales and marketing for greater personalization, which in turn drives better engagement.
Like Calls to Like
Companies grow from an idea. Successful companies continue to grow with proud milestones due to conviction and a passion to make a difference. These principles apply to humans too.
When you bring a human facet to your ICPs, you go beyond the mere company details to understand its story and journey to success. This gives you insights into your buyers’ own human prespectives.
Your buyer personas would, as a result, focus on buyer behaviors, interests, values, priorities, etc., making buyer personas more fully formed, unique, and customized.
A Focus on Personality
When you work to derive comprehensive buyer insights that make a buyer unique, you get to understand the characteristics of the buying group. For example, you may deduce that your buyers are risk-averse or open to calculated risks.
They may like a direct approach to problem-solving or prefer a calmer more subtle approach to issue resolution. The identification of such attributes enables you to engage with them in a way they would respond to better.
A Comprehensive View of the Buyer
When you view your buyers from a human lens, you prioritize not just an individual but their networks too. You discover their partners, customers, and their trusted circle. This knowledge helps you understand factors and experiences that are important to your buyers.
For example, say your buyer is an active member of environmentally-inclined groups. You would then want to make this aspect a highlight in your interactions to make them more relatable to the buyer.
Including the human aspect can deliver stronger and more effective buyer personas, but only when such inclusion makes experiences more buyer-centric at every touch point.
The human approach delivers greater success when infused into your organizational processes. With the human aspect at the core, you start to speak the language of your ideal customer, which builds trust and connection.
It is this emotional connection that leads to increased conversions at every stage.
FinalFunnel’s data services and data-backed marketing solutions empower you in your journey of building buyer trust. With 95+% account accuracy, our ICPs give you insights on primary vendor evaluators as well as key decision-makers.
Our approach leverages the intelligence of tech and the accuracy of human expertise to deliver buyer insights that enable you to make effective GTM decisions.
Contact us today to learn more about how FinalFunnel can help you win the buying game!